News: Tagged as CSS

With Mozilla’s Firefox and Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 10, a significant step has been taken toward widespread OpenType feature support, which allows for things like discretionary ligatures in text and contextual alternates in display. Now with standards solidifying, a level of typographic sophistication previously unachievable anywhere will soon be realized. Ushering in the new browser, we share this demo page with live examples of OpenType features at work.(Note that unless viewed in IE10 or a recent version of Firefox or some other new-ish Mozilla browser, the demos won’t make much sense.)

We move ahead now to take a closer look into each of the examples, and discuss what’s required before we can get started taking full advantage of this new ability.

Contextual Swashes | FF Nexus Serif Italic is the most comprehensive font of the FF Nexus Superfamily, containing beautiful sets of swash letters for the beginnings and ends of words. Thanks to the Contextual Swashes feature, the swash variants of the letters appear automatically in the appropriate positions (as opposed to the “regular” Swashes feature, in which you would have to decide yourself which letters should be swashed).

Stylistic Sets | FF Unit holds the library’s record for Stylistic Sets: It has a whopping 14 sets to tailor the look of selected letters to your needs. (39 OT Features in total!)

Contextual Alternates | FF Mister K isn’t available as a Web FontFont yet, and if you switch off the Contextual Alternates feature on the demo site you’ll see why: It just makes no sense to use it without the connections and letter variants that give FF Mister K its special look.

Small Caps | FF Ernestine is one of the few FontFonts containing two sets of small caps: Small and Petite Caps (the only other Petite Cap FontFont being FF Atma Serif). While Small Caps are available as separate Web FontFonts now, Petite Caps only become accessible through browser OpenType feature support.

Discretionary Ligatures | FF Milo Serif is one of the FontFonts that go wild with extravagant ligatures.

Oldstyle Figures and Ligatures | FF DIN Round and FF Tartine Script can actually look like this on your website right now! Unlike the other features shown above, Oldstyle Figures and Ligatures are included (if available in the design) in all WOFF Web FontFonts today. There’s one more feature we didn’t even mention on the demo page: The Kerning feature is activated for the whole demo page. It is most noticeable in combinations like “We” and “y.”, which just look more even with kerning. This feature is included in the current WOFF Web FontFonts and is applied automatically by some browsers.